It's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen -
* Explosion of social media
* JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers
* Mobile apps
* Crypto
* Machine Learning
and now, AI & LLMs.
The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.
> For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been.
Same here, for sure. I just try to dodge it all as best I can. Seems like every question has the possible answer of LLMs, and nearly always, someone provides it.
There's also this annoying dissonance between 'evangelists' and reality. Evangelists often feign that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, while in practice LLMs remain stupid, error prone, and unreliable for anything beyond tasks that have a vast number sources for highly relevant training. Which also somewhat dilutes the utility, because I could just as well find those sources!
Oh right, that must just be because I'm not giving it the magic prompt that makes them magically turn into geniuses.
Crypto currencies became purely speculative asses and their volatility ensured that they wouldn’t be useful for payment processing. Has block chain in general made any progress in payment processing?
>With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.
I find it to be the exact opposite. The idea of "Artificial Intelligence" as a thinking machine is fascinating. However, now that i learned a certain amount about this current neural network paradigm, the marketing magic of it as an intelligent system is gone, it is no longer interesting to me. These models are just some dry big-data statistical machinery to me.
I think many people find it interesting precisely because they dont understand it and think there is some magic in there. Of course when hype is stupid and people think the singularity is coming then it sounds a lot more interesting
The human brain is also dry big data statistical machinery.
The frontier models (of which R1 is an example) « think » in much the same way a human would - look at their chain of thought output). I think if you shut down LLMs in your head because you think you « understand » them and there’s nothing interesting there, then you’re blinded by hubris.
>I think if you shut down LLMs in your head because you think you « understand » them and there’s nothing interesting there, then you’re blinded by hubris.
I am no expert, and I am well aware that even experts have much to learn about it. It is interesting in its own way, like statistics is too. I don't feel like that changes anything.
It's interesting that every entry in your bullet list is a tech that I find to have had an overall negative impact on society.
Every one of those examples is a genereal tech that could be used for better or worse, but that have almost exclusively been used to more effectively exploit users.
As is always the case, what's good for the VC investor is not necessarily good for everyone...
> The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve
Half the post about AI are telling us how good prompts should make me a 10x engineer, or I made this app in 5 minutes and I don't know how to code. At least for JS and, god forbid, crypto, there was some effort required.
* Explosion of social media
* JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers
* Mobile apps
* Crypto
* Machine Learning
and now, AI & LLMs.
The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.
edit: formatting